jeweled platypus

 

sunday, february 03, 2008
Dan’s modular paper icosahedron and dodecahedron

A few weeks ago, Aaron Straup Cope bookmarked the paper sculpture on the left. It’s part of a photoset of work by Richard Sweeney that includes the partial one on the right.

twenty unit modular piece, approx 40 cm diameter paper, 26 cm

I showed these to my friend Daniel Walsh, a physics major in my college who enjoys polyhedra and making things out of paper. A few days later he’d busted out with his own small, beautiful versions:

the paper polyhedra in somebody's hands

Cody attempting to blow the dodecahedron into the air Dan succeeding at blowing the icosahedron into the air

Dan, on the right, has figured out how to blow spherical paper objects into the air in a way that suspends them for a few seconds as they rotate in place. Cody, on the left, is doing it wrong.

If you’d like to make your own icosahedron (the more elaborate one of those two), download this template (PDF) and print out ten copies of it. Here is what you do:

  1. Cut out one figure along the bold lines.
  2. Score all its curved dotted lines with a dead ballpoint pen or the tip of a lead-less mechanical pencil or something like that. Fold the tabs back and forth to make sure they’re flexible. Pinch gently along the scored curves to begin to form the curved module shape, with the dashes on the inside.
  3. Apply white glue or a glue stick to one of the module’s small tabs and connect it to its neighboring bit of paper, like this:
    the partially-folded shape
    That one actually has two tabs connected already. Do that. Repeat for third tab.
  4. Repeat steps 1-3 for the rest of the modules (twenty modules in total).
  5. Glue modules together on the large tabs. Be sure to have five modules around each corner, i.e. flowers always have five petals. When you have a few modules together, you can insert a pencil or straightened paperclip through the holes to push tabs with glue together to make sure they stick.

This may take a couple hours to complete. It is more fun if you do it with a friend! The last step is taking glamour pictures and showing them off.

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wednesday, january 23, 2008
The aesthetics of squiggles

I downloaded these images in October 2001 from The Wallpaper Machine (you have to highlight the text since it doesn’t work anymore), by Roy Williams and Bruce Sears:

The Wallpaper Machine was a magical combination of nerdiness (reaction-diffusion systems) and more nerdiness (web 1.0 graphical tiled backgrounds). I had no idea how it worked, but I liked how the tiles looked and used them as backgrounds for the first version of something that eventually turned into this website. Now I’m a little older and can read more about reaction-diffusion systems for context even though I still don’t understand much:

Suprisingly complex structures arise out of very simple equations — that is the essence of Alan Turing’s idea. ¶ In this case the equations have been solved on a torus, which means you could use this or one of the many other examples of evolution for tiling the screen on a Web page.

This is a related image from Roy Williams that is pretty in its bright scientific way:

In the middle of the mathy Wikipedia article, there’s another eye-catching group:

And these patterns are found in birds and fish.

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sunday, december 16, 2007
Round things on Etsy

I like how these look:

a plate of bunch of felt salad food

a purple octopus made of polymer clay, seen from above

They reminded me of squared circles so I had to find some of those too:

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wednesday, december 05, 2007
Unlike the artificially coherent city of Santa Barbara

This is the De La Guerra dining commons at UCSB:

an interior shot of a cafeteria

I like it because it’s one of the only new-ish buildings on campus that has an exterior style like the older buildings on campus. The lower right corner of the picture shows a little bit of this sandy stone/concrete pattern that you find on some of the older buildings, like the library:

sunshine and eucalyptus trees

Those brown textured walls and lots of windows are what a friend pointed out to me as making up the UCSB style. Nerdy amazement! I used to be faintly annoyed by the mixed-up randomness of UCSB architecture, but when he said that obvious thing, I realized I could develop extensive naive theories about why I got faintly annoyed by the architecture. Anyway, this is the style I like for my Southern California beach campus because it helps the buildings live comfortably in their surroundings:

a geometric brown stone pattern

a guy walking near the lagoon

But a lot of the newer buildings on campus have been built in a bland neutral postmodern style with lots of orange and yellow and red, and it doesn’t look good in context:

looking at the university center and the lagoon

If you look closer at that one though, it references the older style:

the stone pattern at part of the ucen

I don’t know why the newest developments — the ones built in the past ten years and currently being built — forgot about all that in favor of pastel lameness:

the blocky modern entrance to another cafeteria

A good example of the difference between the styles is these pictures showing off the old and new Engineering buildings, on one of the department websites:

Engineering I, aka Harold Frank hall Engineering I, aka Harold Frank hall

Engineering II Engineering II

The old building has that nice sandy style with vegetation and visual variety; the new one is flat and boring with no local character.

The interiors of the old buildings aren’t so great though, with their own ugly orange stuff. That’s why I like the pretty De La Guerra dining commons so much. Also because of its unlimited cookies and horchata.

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wednesday, november 28, 2007
Omnigraffle gets misused as badly as Excel

This is an Omnigiraffe (see “Thing the Fourth” on that page):

a giraffe made with omnigraffle

Related in silliness: the flowchart animal and the meta giraffe.

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I’m Britta Gustafson.


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